CityFalcon Review – Should You Use This Market News Platform?

About CityFalcon

CityFalcon is a market news platform that leverages artificial intelligence to put together an interactive feed of the stories that matter most for your trading. The idea behind CityFalcon is a good one – you can easily see stories related to your watchlists and track specific market events – but the execution has a long way to go. With the exception of watchlists, CityFalcon has little to differentiate it from a search of Google News or another market news platform.

CityFalcon Pricing Options

CityFalcon is free to get started with as long as you don’t mind advertisements on the site. With the free Basic plan, you can set up three watchlists and five topics per watchlist.

A Silver plan removes advertisements, adds tweets in addition to news stories to your feed, and enables you to set up an unlimited number of watchlists. This plan costs $8 per month or $80 per year, and you can trial it for one week before signing up.

A Gold plan adds access to stories from around 225 paywalled publications, including a number of mainstream news outlets.  This plan costs $19 per month or $190 per year.

It’s worth noting that CityFalcon lists a number of features for the Silver and Gold plans as “Coming Soon.” The Silver Plan, for example, is expected to add advanced news analytics, sentiment analysis, and premium topics in the future. However, without these features, there’s relatively little to be gained by paying for CityFalcon as opposed to using the free Basic plan.

CityFalcon Features

News Feed

The news feed is at the center of CityFalcon. Essentially, this platform uses natural language processing to analyze stories from across the Internet and tag them according to what stock or market they are related to.

So, if you want to find stories about, say, Amazon, CityFalcon will have a list of all stories that are about Amazon. That list will include not just articles that directly cover Amazon, but also stories that are relevant to Amazon because they cover the same market sector or mention the eCommerce giant. The algorithm assigns a relevance score to every story so you can easily sort out noise.

Notably, CityFalcon covers a lot more than just stocks. The platform collates news into what it calls topics, which include asset classes as well as subjects like technical analysis. You can tailor your feed to only show stock news, or you can find articles around commodities, forex, bonds, indices, ETFs, and more. All topics have their own feed that you can access, or you can search CityFalcon’s archive to access stories across topics.

One of the things that was most disappointing about CityFalcon, though, is that the news feed isn’t up-to-the-minute. Most of the news stories for stocks in the middle of a busy trading day, for example, were at least several hours old. This was true even for the stories that the platform highlights as “Trending” – at the time of writing, the top three trending stories were 7, 9, and 18 hours old. For many traders, having news that’s slightly outdated defeats the point of using a market news feed in the first place.

Watchlists

One of the key features of CityFalcon is that you can set up watchlists to create tailored news feeds. These are very flexible, as you can search not just the names of individual assets but also people, countries, indices, government regulators, and private companies. That’s significantly more breadth than most other watchlists offer, which can be useful if your trading strategies relies on spotting news that doesn’t often make headlines.  

Within a watchlist news feed, you have a few additional options to filter the stories you see. You can choose what language stories can be written in, the minimum CityFalcon-assigned relevance score, and the time range for publication. Keep in mind that CityFalcon’s archive currently only extends back 30 days at the moment, although the company is planning to roll out a one-year archive for Silver plan subscribers in the future.

CityFalcon Platform Differentiators

CityFalcon primarily differs from other market news platforms in the breadth of markets you can monitor and your ability to search by more than just ticker symbols. This software can be very useful for traders who monitor not just stocks, but also forex, commodities, and other asset classes. In addition, CityFalcon can be useful for scanning for news around, say, a specific deal since you have much more flexibility to search for people and private companies when setting up a watchlist.

However, unless you can take huge advantage of the watchlists, CityFalcon’s search feature is essentially the same as Google’s search engine. If you’re looking for news about something specific, you’ll get many of the same results from Google News as you would from CityFalcon. 

CityFalcon Alternatives

CityFalcon simply doesn’t deliver for traders who need up-to-the-minute news to make quick trading decisions. If that’s what you’re after, we would recommend Benzinga Pro. This software is pricey compared to CityFalcon – plans start at $99 per month – but the news feed is incredibly fast and does a nice job of providing actionable headlines and summaries. Benzinga Pro also offers an audio squawk function and the option to talk to news desk experts for analysis on how to interpret a piece of news.

What Type Of Trader Is CityFalcon Best For?

CityFalcon markets itself towards traders who need up-to-date, actionable market news. But the platform primarily highlights news stories that are half a day old or even older. So, this software is better suited for medium- and long-term traders who want to keep an eye on their watchlists but don’t need instantaneous updates. Having a curated feed from CityFalcon is nice, but investors could easily create similar watchlists for free using a news service such as Google News.

Pros

• Free plan available and inexpensive paid subscriptions
• Highly customizable watchlists that act like a search engine
• Covers multiple markets, not just stocks
• Relevance score for all news stories

Cons

• Very few extra features offered in paid plans
• News stories are generally several hours old
• Doesn’t offer much more functionality than Google News